20 BOOKS we’re excited to read this fall
Even for diehard summer fans, the season must change, and a good book is one of the best consolations of fall. Here are 20 books we’re looking forward to digging into as the lazy days draw down.
THE FRAUD
By Zadie Smith
What does it take to uncover a fraud or claim one’s fate? Inspired by a real trial in Victorian England, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, brilliantly written in spite of her hesitations, crackles with details and characters that bring to life issues of power, race, and the notion of authenticity. (9/5) — Lauren LeBlanc
GOOD WOMEN
By Halle Hill
With humor and immediacy, Halle Hill’s empathetic, feral debut story collection spotlights 12 Black women (one, sparked by “a dull ache so big nothing could help it,” describes the urge “to be carved out with a spoon”) across Appalachia and the Deep South, marked by faith and abandon. (9/12)
—LL
THE VASTER WILDS
By Lauren Groff
Following her medieval novel “Matrix,” the dynamic Lauren Groff ’s seventh book is a visceral and provocative historical novel set around 1609 that draws inspiration from early-American captivity narratives and “Robinson Crusoe.” Here, an escaped servant girl must rely on her wits in an unwelcome landscape in order to survive. (9/12) — LL
A HOUSE FOR ALICE
By Diana Evans
Twin domestic tragedies entwine in this richly loving and fraught novel. The 2017 Grenfell Towers fire in London looms as Diana Evans juxtaposes this disaster with the death of a patriarch whose loss complicates the actions of his wife, Alice, who longs to return at last to her homeland, Nigeria. (9/12) — LL
BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL
By Jonathan Lethem
“Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years,” writes Lethem about his hometown, Brooklyn. Tracking the slippery, overlapping paths of gentrification and crime are a vast cast of characters for whom time and space bend and retract in this expansive novel. (10/3) — LL
THE MANIAC
By Benjamin Labatut
A sleeper hit, Benjamin Labatut’s 2021 novel “When We Cease to Understand the World” explored the unexpected and sometimes terrifying work of scientists. With “The MANIAC,” Labatut, again, toggles between nonfiction and fiction to probe even greater stakes, examining a triptych of scientists tapping into boundless forces that defy containment. (10/3) — LL
BLACKOUTS
By Justin Torres
Justin Torres’s 2011 novel, “We the Animals,” enjoyed great celebration at its publication and became a queer classic coming-of-age tale. His much-anticipated sophomore novel shares Torres’s innovative storytelling and style, but on a far larger scale, blending fact and fiction to interrogate erasure, resurrect lost love, and recover the past. (10/10) — LL
SAME BED, DIFFERENT DREAMS
By Ed Park
Drawing from 20th-century Korean history, American pop culture, and technology-induced anxiety, Ed Park has created a deliciously dense and heady yet comic and nimble sophomore novel. Characters, whose connections surface over time, are bound by politics and unexpected influences whose realities shift as history reveals itself to be unstable. (11/7) —LL
THE NEW NATURALS
By Gabriel Bump
Gabriel Bump captures our contemporary condition with grace. After a tragic loss, Rio, a young Black academic, imagines an under
ground utopia nestled into a remote Western Massachusetts hill. In Bump’s sharp, imaginative novel, this unlikely haven finds a Benefactor along with souls searching for new beginnings. Will it endure? (11/14) — LL
WELCOME HOME, STRANGER By Kate Christensen
Divorced and disenchanted with her work, Rachel waits until her mother dies before going home to see her sister in Maine. This isn’t a novel about reconciliation, but it’s a satisfying, intimate novel about complicated people at middle age, coming to terms with lost love, and the ghosts who shaped your life. (12/5) — LL
MOTHER TONGUE: The Surprising History of Women’s Words By Jenni Nuttall
As the dedicatees and primary readers of the first English dictionaries, women “drove the variety in English’s vocabulary and sponsored its growth,” writes Nuttall, a scholar of medieval literature. Edifying and enlivening, “Mother Tongue” excavates the history of various words, from those relating to menstruation to words used to describe violence against women. (8/29) — Rhoda Feng
UP HOME By Ruth J. Simmons
Simmons, former president of Brown University (among others), grew up as the 12th child of East Texas sharecroppers in 1945. In this plainspoken, deeply felt memoir, she recalls the shaping forces of love and education that eventually propelled her into a world beyond the limits of home. (9/5) — Francie Lin
SLEEPLESS: A Memoir of Insomnia By Marie Darrieussecq
A beguiling med-moir, Darrieussecq’s book swirls around the theme of insomnia, from the author’s numerous attempts to mitigate her sleeplessness to the literary treatment of insomnia by writers like Proust and Kafka to sleeplessness as experienced by unhoused people or refugees who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. (9/5) — RF
CROSSINGS: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet By Ben Goldfarb
Goldfarb’s deeply researched account of the many ways roads disrupt and endanger wildlife — from butterflies to cougars, from Bozeman to Brazil — is thoughtful, witty, urgent, and, in its vivid portraits of people and projects seeking to mitigate the damage, deeply inspirational. (9/12) — FL
OUR FRAGILE MOMENT: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis By Michael Mann
“There is no need to exaggerate the threat [of climate change]. The facts alone justify immediate and dramatic action,” writes climate scientist Mann in his new book, a refreshingly unhysterical yet bracing account of major climate inflection points in Earth’s 4.5-billionyear history. To avert total climate catastrophe, Mann sensibly counsels “justified righteous anger” coupled with political action. (9/26) — RF
A MAN OF TWO FACES: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial By Viet Thanh Nguyen
This affecting memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer” and “The Refugees” recounts, in fragmentary fashion, the author’s leaving Vietnam with his family as a 4-yearold, resettling in the US — what he later somewhat sardonically calls AMERICA™ — as refugees, and becoming a writer. (10/3) — RF
ALFIE & ME: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe By Carl Safina
In this lyrical, wide-ranging inquiry into the connection between nature and humanity, ecologist and writer Safina’s muse is an orphaned baby screech owl whom he and his wife raise and release, with surprising outcomes. Forged in a dark pandemic year, the human-owl bond proves illuminating in all senses. (10/3) — FL
ARTIFICIAL: A Love Story By Amy Kurzweil
Kurzweil’s father, inventor Ray Kurzweil, is developing a chatbot to resurrect his own father — a conductor who fled the Nazis in 1938 — out of salvaged writings. A breathtaking graphic memoir, “Artificial” is also a tender family story and a meditation on how art, technology, and memory keep people alive. (10/17) — FL
THE NIGHT PARADE: A Speculative Memoir By Jami Nakamura Lin
Part personal narrative, part mythical taxonomy, “The Night Parade” intertwines Nakamura Lin’s lifelong experience of bipolar disorder with figures from Japanese and Taiwanese myth, resulting in a moody, unusual, and compassionate portrait of a struggle too often reduced to cliché in stories about mental illness. (10/24) — FL
SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT: Essays and Outtakes By Anthony Veasna So
Anthony Veasna So’s talent for evoking the anxieties, longings, and memories of diasporic Cambodian Americans — on voluptuous display in his posthumously published short story collection “Afterparties” — is put to vivid use in this new collection of delicately hinged essays that address everything from “deep reality TV” to So’s stint as an art student. (12/5) — RF
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and more.
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her Substack newsletter is https://laurenleblanc.substack.com/.
Francie Lin is the acting Books editor at the Boston Globe.